Spoken Word of SidMouth presents Storyteller Shonaleigh Cumbers
“The Tower of Bagel”
In medieval Odessa, a humble Jewish baker, Lemuel, takes in a foundling. But the boy has no tongue. His lifelong silence holds many secrets – which begin to come to light as the boy grows to manhood. Before Lemuel teases out the tangled knot of riddles which his stepson has inherited from his mysterious past, his search for answers will send him on a lonely odyssey halfway around the world, and tracking – of course – the slow emergence of a cutting-edge recipe for a new kind of savoury bread roll.
Shonaleigh was commissioned to create this popular piece in 1999 and has travelled the world delighting audiences with the mix of story, song, riddle and seeds of wisdom. She is probably the last Drut’syla – a Jewish tradition of storytelling.